The problem comes for various reasons. The one that attacted me was since I never added the subdirectories of the /app/tmp directory into my subversion repository. The name tmp suggested me that it would be recreate the entire required directory  structure. But I guessed it wrong. After hunting the solution and not able to find it, I simply realized that the default install of cake has content below the tmp. and, sooner I placed it back, cakephp home page was happy. The directories structure is as:

• app
  • tmp
    • cache
    • logs
    • sessions
    • tests

Simply make sure tmp directory structure remains the same. As suggested by the cakephp error, core.php won’t actually help in this particular case.